Article: From Ticino to Basel: The Italian Renaissance Reimagined in Gold for Switzerland’s Finest Interiors
From Ticino to Basel: The Italian Renaissance Reimagined in Gold for Switzerland’s Finest Interiors
The Italian Renaissance changed forever how the world understands beauty, the human body, light, space and emotion. Centuries later, its visual language is still very much alive. It is not a historical style to copy, but a source of inspiration to reinterpret. Switzerland has played a surprising part in that story. Some of the architects who gave Rome its most famous Renaissance and Baroque faces were born on the shores of Lake Lugano. Carlo Maderno, who designed the façade of St Peter's Basilica, came from Capolago. Domenico Fontana, who raised the great obelisk in St Peter's Square, came from Melide. Francesco Borromini, the most daring architect of Baroque Rome, was born in Bissone.
For the French-American artist and photographer of Italian descent Zack Zublena, the Renaissance becomes a contemporary visual dialogue. Through photography, collage and mixed techniques, he takes classical figures, golden light, mythology and sculptural forms out of their original context and gives them a place in the interiors of today.
Discover the Italian Renaissance collection: works that sit between classical beauty, mythology and golden light.
This approach does not try to recreate Renaissance painting. It asks a different question: what happens when the visual language of the Italian Renaissance is seen through the lens of contemporary fine art photography?
When Photography Meets the Renaissance
The Renaissance was an age of extraordinary experimentation. Artists explored anatomy, perspective, proportion, architecture, mythology and the relationship between the human figure and the space around it.
In Switzerland, that spirit of experimentation never left. The Kunstmuseum Basel grew from the Amerbach Cabinet, which the city acquired in 1661, and it is considered the oldest public art collection in the world. It holds the world's largest collection of works by Hans Holbein the Younger, the great Renaissance master who worked in Basel. And every June, Art Basel turns the city into the meeting place of the global art world.
Photography offers another way to explore the same ideas. In Zack Zublena's work, the camera is a tool for building images, not just recording reality. The human figure can look monumental, mysterious, almost architectural. Gold turns skin into something close to gilded sculpture. Shadows create the depth of a fresco.
Archangel Michael, Golden Guardian brings several of these ideas together: the monumental figure, the symbolism of wings and the power of gold. The work speaks to Renaissance iconography while remaining unmistakably contemporary.
Light as a Language
In Renaissance art, light was never just a technical element. It was a language. A face emerging from darkness could become the centre of an entire composition. A hand lit against a shadowed background suddenly became symbolic.
Swiss museums treat light with the same reverence. At the Fondation Beyeler in Riehen, the Italian architect Renzo Piano designed a glass roof that lets soft daylight fall onto the works, so every painting changes with the sky. Gold, too, has a long history in Swiss soil. At the Swiss National Museum in Zurich, the Celtic gold treasure of Erstfeld, found in the canton of Uri, still shines more than two thousand years after it was made. Zack Zublena works with controlled light and deep contrast that give his images an almost painterly quality. The gold recalls gilded frames, ancient treasure and the precision of the finest craftsmanship. In photography, it takes on a new physical quality: reflective, atmospheric and contemporary.
Anatomy of the Soul explores the relationship between the human body and the atmosphere around it. The figure stops being the portrait of a specific person. It becomes a study of form, identity and the link between the physical and the symbolic.
The Human Body as Sculpture
One of the strongest connections between the Renaissance and contemporary fine art photography is how they treat the human body. Renaissance artists studied anatomy with extraordinary precision, inspired by the sculpture of antiquity. In Basel, Holbein's The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb (1521–22) is one of the most unflinching studies of the human body ever painted.
Photography approaches the same subject from another direction. Through pose, light, framing and composition, a photographed figure becomes sculptural. Without unnecessary detail, the eye focuses on silhouette, muscle, gesture and empty space. Switzerland gave the 20th century its most radical sculptor of the body: Alberto Giacometti, born in the Bregaglia valley. His elongated walking figures, gathered at the Kunsthaus Zürich, turned the human silhouette into pure presence.
Winged Essence takes this idea further. It joins the human figure with wings and a bold visual language of gold and blue. The work recalls religious and mythological imagery without belonging to a single era.
Wings, Myth and the Renaissance Imagination
Wings have lived in the imagination of Western art for centuries. Angels, messengers and allegorical figures fill Renaissance painting and sculpture. In Switzerland, wings belong to the mountains. Above the peaks of the Engadin and the Bernese Oberland, the golden eagle still rides the thermals. It is the true lord of the Alps and a symbol of freedom and height.
Wings can also be read in a more abstract way: as an image of freedom, transformation, desire, transcendence, or the longing to go beyond the physical world.
Wings of Desire plays with this symbolic vocabulary. Film lovers will recognise the title of Wim Wenders' classic. Here the wings are far more than ornament. They make the figure ambiguous, suspended between earthly beauty and something almost celestial.
That ambiguity is at the heart of contemporary readings of the Renaissance. The goal is not to imitate the past, but to let its symbols take on new meanings.
A Beauty That Does Not Age
Renaissance images still move us because they see beauty as something bigger than fashion. Their faces, bodies and gestures speak of universal themes: desire, mortality, spirituality, identity, love and the search for meaning.
Symphony of Her Soul approaches the figure through emotion and atmosphere. With its Venetian mask and sheet music, the image creates a contemporary story in which music, movement and the body merge. It evokes a summer evening at the Lucerne Festival, in Jean Nouvel's KKL Luzern overlooking the lake. It equally evokes a night at the Opernhaus Zürich or the Grand Théâtre de Genève, or a concert high in the mountains at the Verbier Festival.
From the Italian Masters to Contemporary Interiors
The great masters of the Renaissance created for architecture: churches, palaces and private residences. Their compositions were designed to speak with the space that held them. Swiss architecture still carries that ambition today. From Mario Botta in Ticino to Peter Zumthor and Herzog & de Meuron, Swiss architects have shaped some of the most admired buildings in the world.
Contemporary fine art photography can play the same role. A large-format work becomes an architectural element. It can live in a residence on Zurich's Goldküste in Küsnacht or Zollikon, a lakeside villa in Cologny or a lake-view home above Lugano. It suits a penthouse in Basel, Lausanne or Montreux. It also belongs in a chalet in Gstaad, Verbier, Zermatt or St. Moritz, or in the lobby of one of Switzerland's legendary grand hotels. A monumental figure sets the scale. A restrained palette creates atmosphere. Gold brings warmth and light without overloading the space with colour, in natural dialogue with larch, stone, concrete and the white light of the Alps.
The Gladiator Philosopher shows this relationship between classical visual language and contemporary interior design. The work carries the monumental presence of classical and Renaissance figures while working as a statement piece for today.
The Renaissance as a Living Language
Perhaps the most interesting way to look at the Italian Renaissance today is not as a closed era, but as a visual language that keeps evolving. That language is made of the human body, dramatic light, mythology, architecture, symbols, gold and gesture. It is also made of the relationship between beauty and emotion.
These elements can be photographed, built digitally, turned into collage and reinterpreted. They can even be deliberately detached from their historical context. Ticino shows this beautifully. The same lakes that gave Rome Maderno, Fontana and Borromini later produced Mario Botta, whose churches and museums rework the circle, the cylinder and the arch, the timeless geometry of the Renaissance, in stone and brick.
Serpent of Light introduces another archetypal symbol: the serpent. Every Basler knows its legendary cousin, the basilisk. Part serpent, part dragon, it holds the city's coat of arms and watches over the basilisk fountains that line Basel's streets. Set against a Pompeii fresco, the work brings together mythology, transformation and mystery. It builds a bridge between ancient imagery and contemporary fine art photography.
The Body, Light and the Classical Ideal
The Renaissance fascination with the human body was deeply tied to the classical world. Switzerland has its own window onto that world. Just outside Basel, Augusta Raurica preserves the remains of a great Roman city. Its theatre is among the best preserved north of the Alps, a reminder that the classical ideal the Renaissance rediscovered once stood on Swiss soil.
Contemporary photography can revisit this ideal without turning it into an absolute rule. The body becomes material for composition: a line, a silhouette, a volume and a source of light.
Golden Tension explores this relationship through the male figure. The tension between body, light and shadow gives the image a sculptural strength and places it firmly in contemporary fine art photography.
A Meaningful Gift for the Festive Season
Finding the right gift for someone who loves art, design, architecture and beautiful interiors is not easy. A work of art is different. It is not just a gift to unwrap, but a piece that becomes part of a home and keeps its meaning for years.
In Switzerland, the year-end season belongs to the mountains and the fireside: first snow in the valleys, evenings in the chalet, gatherings with family and friends. For those drawn to the beauty of the Italian Renaissance, to classical figures, mythology and golden light, a contemporary fine art photograph inspired by this tradition is a deeply personal choice for the festive season and the year-end celebrations. For collectors in Zurich, Geneva, Basel, Lugano, Lausanne, Gstaad or St. Moritz, it is also a way to bring a piece of European art history into a contemporary interior. It suits a country that has always valued what is made to last.
If you are looking for a unique gift for someone who already has everything, an original work of art can be one of the most personal choices there is.
The Past, Seen Anew
The Italian Renaissance does not need to be recreated to stay relevant. Its ideas can be transformed. Its symbols can be questioned, simplified and reinvented. Its fascination with the human body can become contemporary photography. Its dramatic use of light can become a new atmosphere, and its mythology can be the starting point for entirely new stories.
Through gold, light, bodies, wings, mythology and emotion, Zack Zublena explores this vocabulary. He creates works that look to the past while belonging fully to the present.
Discover the Italian Renaissance collection: contemporary fine art photography inspired by classical beauty, mythology and the timeless visual language of the Renaissance.
